Back to the text file?

Posted by Derek Cornish
Dec 8, 2006 at 07:58 PM

I came across one of Chris Murtland’s blog items of last year [ http://www.murtworld.com/2005/09/life-in-files.php ] today, where he discusses the value of using plain text files as one’s basic information-container (but maybe extending this to cover pdf files, and other widely-used standard types: html? xml?). As he mentions, this is a more modest - and perhaps more practical version of more radical solutions, e.g. http://www.43folders.com/2005/08/17/life-inside-one-big-text-file/

In fact, there is a lot of interest in text-files - e.g., http://gtdwannabe.blogspot.com/2006/08/ive-got-text-fetish.html and http://todotxt.com/whytxt.php where the rationale is pithily explained: “Plain text is software and operating system agnostic. It’s searchable, portable, lightweight and easily manipulated. It’s unstructured. It works when someone else’s web server is down or your Outlook .PST file is corrupt. Since it’s been around since the dawn of computing, it’s safe to say it’s completely future-proof. There’s no exporting and importing, no databases or tags or flags or stars or prioritizing or [Insert company name here]-induced rules on what you can and can’t do with it.”

It also forces some difficult choices - for example, maybe abandoning software that uses proprietary file formats that make it difficult to search them from outside, unless the data itself remains as ASCII (e.g. Lotus Agenda; Zoot).

Given my predilection for Zoot (no rich-text editor) and continuing love of the old plain DOS programs and interfaces, I’m a natural pushover for people who suggest getting back to ASCII basics.

A lot of the web material I now mindlessly download and store, images and all, in bloated directories could as easily be d/l as simple text. Maybe that would be a good discipline, and maybe others stronger-willed than I do so already.

So is there still mileage in the idea of going back to basics in this way? What do others think?

Derek